Accounting
by Ancalime8301
Summary: Tony Stark knew what it was to have blood on his hands. (Post-Captain America: Civil War)


A/N: In the tradition of the Lord of the Rings fandom, I come bearing a small gift-fic for my birthday. Can be read as a prelude to _Amend_ , but can also stand alone.

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Tony Stark knew what it was to have blood on his hands.

He'd been a weapons developer-the best, because he couldn't be anything less-and he'd had that thrown in his face by a leader in a terrorist organization. _The most famous mass murderer in the history of America_ , Abu Bakaar had named him.

Having witnessed the litter of soldier's bodies surrounding the convoy, Tony knew the label wasn't wrong. It had never quite sunk in before that to be effective at what he did was to kill-murder-untold numbers of innocents. Being the Merchant of Death was fine so long as the casualties were America's enemies, but then he learned through painful experience that weapons can be used against anyone, even their creator.

After his escape, he memorized those soldiers' names, added Yinsen to the end of the roster, and vowed to atone for his sins. _Don't waste your life_ were Yinsen's last words after the man had saved him twice, and by god he was going to make him proud.

His resolve hardened when he figured out he was actively in the process of dying and he moved up the Expo by six months.

By some accident of luck there had been no fatalities at the Expo, no fatalities except his attempt to make good with the world. Now that he wasn't in imminent danger of death, he had another chance.

The citizens of New York weren't so fortunate the next time around. Even though neither he nor his weapons were directly responsible for the bloodshed, it stung that his new self-sufficient tower had been used to help open the portal. The death toll was low compared to what it might have been but still more than doubled his mental list.

Then there was Ultron and the realization that even the things he was creating to protect people were hurting them. Between South Africa and Sokovia, his accounting of the dead more than doubled again.

Only after the fact did he learn about Wanda's parents, and their names-Erik and Magda-etched themselves at the bottom of his list in red like blood.

 _Trying to rid the world of weapons, you gave it its best one ever_ , he'd been told years ago, and it burned that it was still true.

So he stopped. He stepped back from the Avengers, redoubled his efforts to create things that would help people, not hurt them, even as vision-Steve's words haunted him. _You could have saved us. Why didn't you do more?_

He did what he could, supplying them with the best money could buy, inventing ever better tools-weapons, why did it always come down to weapons-and praying it would be enough.

And then Charles Spencer was thrown in his face and he realized his mistake: it could never be enough. He could never make up for what he had done. The red on his ledger was unmatched by anyone he knew of and he would never be able to do enough good to come close to balancing the scales.

The Accords seemed like the best available way to keep the current Avengers from carrying the same weight of guilt that he did; if another group signed off on their missions, each individual could not be held responsible for any deaths that might occur. And maybe, just maybe, the U.N. could stop them from carrying out the suicide mission that would end in the dead superheroes he'd foreseen. _You could have saved us. Why didn't you do more?_ With that rationale at the forefront of his mind, he agreed to escort Ross to the compound.

In trying to save his teammates, he murdered the team itself.

 _The Avengers_ was added to his list in thick, black letters, twice as large as anything else. Even he couldn't foresee how many civilian casualties would result from that grave miscalculation.

After Siberia, the one thing that haunted him most wasn't the damn video, wasn't even Steve Rogers' inevitable betrayal of him in favor of his old friend, it was the only words he and Bucky Barnes had directly exchanged.

 _Do you even remember them?_

 _I remember all of them._

With the lengthy list of dead on his own conscience, he had to know just how many "all of them" was. He spent the better part of a week researching the Winter Soldier, digging up every stray bit of information that could be made accessible to his mainframes, legally or not. The picture remained incomplete and he wondered how much was out there in non-electronic documents. He resorted to asking Natasha, who seemed suspicious about his need for the information but efficiently told him what she knew. He thanked her, which also made her suspicious, and returned to the lab in his tower to ponder.

All of them turned out to be at least fifty people, including his parents: a list not incomparable to his own. While his total death toll was higher than he knew thanks to his weapons (Jarvis had offered to attempt a calculation once, but he'd been dying and trying to put on the Expo and that information was more than he could bear at the time), Barnes' victims had all died at his hands while his mind was hijacked by HYDRA.

To remember the murders your shadow self had committed . . . no wonder the Barnes in that silo had seemed cowed.

While Tony was quite happy to leave Barnes in his cryogenic hidey hole, he could feel some sympathy for the guilt that drove him there.

He wished such an easy solution could be found for him.


End file.
